The Gilda Stories

The novel follows an enslaved woman—first called Girl, later renamed Gilda—across two centuries, from her escape in 1850 to the year 2050, encountering her at crucial moments separated by decades. Each chapter functions as a discrete episode, a snapshot of Gilda's life in a different place and era, with different companions and different moral dilemmas. This structure resembles interconnected short stories more than a traditional narrative arc, which is precisely where the book's formal intelligence resides: Gomez uses discontinuity as meaning. The gaps between chapters mirror the fragmented historical record of Black women's lives; what survives is partial, episodic, contested. The reader must hold these moments together, must imagine the connective tissue, must actively construct Gilda's continuity.

What distinguishes Gomez's reimagining of vampire mythology is its radical ethics. Her vampires do not dominate or destroy; they seek balance with those from whom they feed. When Gilda takes blood, she reads minds and leaves behind something the donor both needs and wants—a gift hidden in the exchange itself. This inverts the predator-prey binary that typically structures vampire fiction. More significantly, it reframes the relationship between marginalized people and the systems that exploit them; rather than accept victimhood or seek revenge through domination, Gilda's vampires pursue something harder: authentic relationship across the power imbalance. The novel asks repeatedly what it means to live inside one's power while acting responsibly, to build genuine community across lines of difference. These are political and philosophical questions; Gomez refuses to let the vampire metaphor remain mere entertainment.

The novel's treatment of Gilda's Blackness and lesbianism is deliberately understated—not absent, but woven into the texture of her existence rather than foregrounded as crisis. She experiences racism from white society whether or not they know her supernatural nature; she loves women quietly and sustains those relationships across decades. This approach allows Gomez to explore how marginalized identity shapes one's navigation of the world without making identity itself the plot. The strongest chapters—particularly 'Yerba Buena, 1890'—demonstrate how carefully Gomez can render a moment when historical oppression and personal longing intersect. Bird, Gilda's Lakota lover and first vampire companion, remains a constant emotional anchor across centuries, a testament to bonds that outlast individual lives.

Yet the episodic structure that gives the novel its formal power also creates uneven execution. Some chapters feel fully realized—complete moral and emotional arcs—while others read as sketches, particularly the later sections set in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Hampton Falls chapter (2020) in particular feels underdeveloped, lacking the depth of earlier sequences. This unevenness is not fatal, but it is real: the book's reach sometimes exceeds its grasp. Additionally, while the refusal to make Gilda's Blackness or lesbianism sensational is admirable, some readers may feel these dimensions remain insufficiently explored in their specific historical contexts; the novel occasionally feels more interested in transcendence than in the particular texture of oppression.

The Gilda Stories ultimately succeeds because it trusts its reader to do interpretive work. It does not spell out its philosophy; it embodies it in form and action. A novel that spans 200 years and refuses a single climax, that privileges relationship over plot, that imagines freedom as something built through daily practice rather than purchased through violence—this is a quiet formal achievement. Gomez has written a book about witness, about the accumulation of small choices, about what it means to remain human (or beyond human) while the world changes around you. That it was written in 1991, republished in 2016, and remains vital in 2026 suggests something enduring in its vision.